Luciano Floridi (2011), Minds and Machines 21(4), 549–566 — DOI-10.1007/s11023-011-9259-6
Key takeaways
- Individuating a self is logically prior to re-identifying it. Floridi argues that the self can be individuated informationally, as a system built up through three successive “membranes” (corporeal, cognitive, consciousness). That makes ICTs, which reshape all three, literal technologies of the self.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-130. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Floridi proposes an informational account of personal identity. Plato’s chariot, read as a multiagent system, sets the problem of what holds the self together as a coherent unity. He separates two branches of a theory of the self (“egology”), the individualisation of the self and its identification, argues that both presuppose an informational approach, and holds that individualisation comes first. His positive proposal is a three-membranes model of the self, which he uses to interpret ICTs as technologies of the self. Using Aristotle’s anagnorisis (“realisation”), he defends a Spinozian conclusion within informational structural realism: selves are the final stage in the development of informational structures. The paper ends by calling for an ethics, or “ecology”, of self-shaping.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 195 seconds of active reading over 4 sessions. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-130 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the programmatic statement of Floridi’s informational, level-of-abstraction approach to the self and its link to his information ethics; its central model is a self-described figure, not an argued theory, and the individuation-first thesis is asserted in a few lines.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-130, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — t=95 s over two sessions shows interest, and the skim captures the architecture. A deeper reading would be for the individualisation/identification argument, which is only sketched.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-130 is that reading):
- A standard reference for an informational, level-of-abstraction approach to personal identity. Useful as a foil to the extended-mind thesis (LIT-097) and to identity questions about AI instances (compare LIT-206’s “instance agent”).
- Check whether the three-membranes model does real work on the individuation problem or restates an evolutionary story. The argument for “individualisation before identification” is the load-bearing claim.
- The metaphysical backdrop, informational structural realism, is assumed from Floridi 2008 and 2011 rather than defended here.
Access when seeded: Springer serves only the abstract page, since the article is paywalled. philpapers.org is behind Cloudflare. Read the full published-version PDF (18 pp.) from the Wayback Machine capture (2024-09-09) of philpapers.org/archive/FLOTIN.pdf, stamped “Electronic copy available at ssrn.com/abstract=3840132”. Read the abstract, all section heads, the chariot section, the start of “Egology as Synchronic Individualisation”, the three-membranes pages (pp. 557–560), the start of “ICTs as Technologies of the Self”, “The Logic of Realisation” and the Conclusion. “Published online: 1 September 2011” per the PDF header and Crossref.